Learning the Interface

Freestyles user interface is built from the ground up to be as simple and easy to use as possible. But we have tried very hard to do so without sacrificing any power.

To accomplish this goal the interface is designed to be highly context sensitive. That means it only shows the options that are available at any given moment, instead of showing everything all the time.

The user interface is designed so that you never have to search for a feature, or have to change multiple panels to do a specific task. Instead you just pick the item you want to work with, select what you want to do with it, and the user interface automatically accommodates that task. This makes every task you perform in Freestyle feel like you use a specialized tool just for that task.

Let's begin learning Freestyle.

First Glance

The main window is split into sections. Let's take a look at Freestyle with a very simple scene created:

Freestyle with a very simple scene and no license key entered.

The sections of the interface are:

• Notifications - gives messages to the user.
• Toolbar - contains common actions.
• Outline - a tree of all the items currently in the scene.
• Inspector - details and properties of the currently selected item.
• Tool settings - used to tweak the active tool.
• Viewport - interactive 3D view of the scene.

We will walk through each interface section together.

Notifications

Notifications simply inform you about issues that you should be aware of. A notification can easily be removed by clicking the X to its right. The notification will return if the issue rises again.

The color of a notification indicates its severity. Grey just means some information, yellow is a warning and red indicates an error.

Toolbar

The toolbar contains common actions. It is used to create a new document, saving and loading a document, undoing and redoing actions and adding and removing items from the scene.

Other things the toolbar can be used for is entering license keys, opening the about dialog and getting help.

Outline

The Outline displays every item that exists in the current scene. It is used to select items. As items are added and removed from the scene, they will appear and disappear from the Outline as well. This way, if you cannot see all the items at once in the Viewport, you can use the Outline to select and inspect them.

Inspector

The Inspector lets you view and edit the details and properties of the currently selected item.

It also manages the interaction mode of the item, mainly manifested in how you interact with the item in the viewport. Based on the interaction mode the Inspector also contains a number of actions that can be performed on the item at the given time.

Tool settings

If the selected item has an active tool then you can tweak the settings of it in this view. Every item can have its own active tool, so by switching the selected item you can get different content in the Tool Settings view.

Viewport

The Viewport is your interactive sandbox. You will use the Viewport to interact with the items in the scene.

The viewport has two modes. The pick mode lets you select which item you want to work on; while the edit mode lets you actually modify the selected item. You can change mode using the two buttons in the upper left corner of the Viewport.

The orientation of the viewport can be gazed by looking in the lower left corner of the viewport. Here the three axes correspond to the coordinate axes in the manner red = X, green = Y, blue = Z (think "RGB = XYZ").

You can rotate the camera around its target with the middle mouse button. The controls in the upper right corner of the viewport allows for further control.